Siri is an artificial intelligence (AI) that you can carry around in the pocket, where it waits patiently to be told what to do. In the week we spend together, my AI assistant has performed admirably in finding me restaurants, or the location of the nearest coffee shop.

    A typical command might be: “Reserve a table for two at a good French restaurant in San Francisco.” Siri responds by presenting a list of top-rated restaurants that can be booked on OpenTable.com. If you say which time you want, it can book you a table without your lifting a finger. In some ways Siri is just a fancy program to the 35 websites it can connect to, from taxi booking websites to movie review databases (数据库). But what's new is the way it can analyze the intentions of its users and use those sites to put them into action.

    Siri attaches possibilities to the explanation of each word and compare your location with other data, some of which you must provide yourself. To send email reminders, Siri obviously needs to know your email address. To “find me the flower shop closest to work”, it needs to know where you work. To pay bills or buy airline tickets, it would need to be linked to your credit card.

    That raises the question of how far we are willing to trust a piece of software that can go and do things for us based on what it “thinks” we mean. Siri may be simple, and always shows its explanation of a command before carrying it out. But it gives users a preview of a new balance between privacy, trust and convenience that the expansion of AI into everyday life is likely to develop.

    There was a strange father, John Blake, from Michigan, who named his children after a computer software term. He told the local newspaper the US traditional way of adding “Junior” or “II” after a boy's name was too common. So, when his son was born last week, he decided on the name John Blake 2.0, as if he were a software programmer.

    Mr. Blake admitted that it took months to persuade his wife, Jamie, to accept the idea. Mrs. Blake said she asked several friends whether they could accept this name or not. “All the men,” she said, “felt the name was cool.” However，her women friends did not think so. “I think the women end up like it，”she said.

    Mr. Blake told the local newspaper he got the idea from a film called The Legend of 1900，in which an abandoned baby is given the name 1900 to remember the year of its birth. “I thought that if they can do it , why can't we?” he said. After little John version 2.0 was born, Mr. Blake even sent a celebratory e-mail to the family and friends, which was designed to look as if he and his wife had created a new software. “I wrote things like there are a lot of new features from Version 1.0 with additional features from Jamie,” he said. And he has already planned for his son's future. “If he has a child, he could name it 3.0,” he said.

    A woman lost the sight in one eye after going swimming in a pool at a hotel wearing contact lenses（隐形眼镜）. Jennie Hurst, from Southampton, suffered from a rare and painful infection caused by amoeba（变形虫）in water. The infection causes people to be sensitive to light and the 28-year-old said she had to stay in a dark room for three months. She is now warning of the dangers of swimming or showering wearing contacts.

    Ms Hurst experienced four operations and a treatment in which she had eye drops every half hour. "During that time I stayed in my bedroom with black curtains at the window. The only thing I could do was to listen to the radio. One evening, I was so eager to look out of window to get a look of the outside world that I opened my curtains in the middle of the night. As soon as I did this the moon shone in my eyes and it really hurt. I didn't do that again. I have been left with no sight in my left eye and the damage to my right eye could be lasting," she said.

    Ms Hurst had been wearing contact lenses for five years. "I don't even like swimming,"she said. "My friends were quite surprised that I had gone swimming and probably thought that I had been a bit lazy. I wasn't aware of the problem at all — it didn't even enter my brain to take them out. I felt responsible that I had let it happen when actually I could have just taken my contacts out."

    Two summers ago I was about to turn fifty and wanted to do something I'd never done before. My daughter Bailey thought skydiving (跳伞) would be perfect for me. I can promise you that of all the things I was thinking of doing, jumping out of an airplane never came close to making the list. As I age, I seem to have developed a growing fear of heights.

    After several requests from my daughter, I finally said yes and she looked almost shocked. I told a friend what we were doing, then we set off. We had a 3-hour drive to the jump site. We drove through some beautiful countryside, but then we passed a small cemetery(墓地). Then we passed another cemetery and another one. I asked if so many people died jumping out of airplanes in this area that they needed to keep building more cemeteries to bury all the bodies!

    As we squeezed into the little plane, I tightly held the right hand of my partner Ronnie. The short ride to altitude was cruel for me. As Bailey stepped to the door, she looked back at me and said “Dad, I'm sure you can do it!” I said yes as she rolled out. I immediately looked behind me and said “RONNIE I AM NOT FEELING GOOD!” He said, “It's going to be great. Besides, it's too late now anyway”, and we jumped out.

    The next five minutes were some of the most amazing of my life. It was so beautiful and peaceful—except for the parts where I was screaming. I prayed to God for the parachute (降落伞) to open, but mostly I told Him how thankful I was for my life and being with me through good and bad.

    Email has brought the art of letter writing back to life, but some experts think the resulting spread of bad English does more harm than good.

    Email is a form of communication that is changing, for the worse, the way we write and use language, say some communication researchers. It is also changing the way we interact(交流) and build relationship. These are a few of recently recognized features of email, say experts, that should cause individual and organizations to rethink the way they use email.

    "Email has increased the spread of careless writing habits, "says Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University. She says the poor spelling, grammar, punctuation(标点符号) and sentence structure of emails reflect a growing unconcern to the way we write.

    Baron argues that we should not forgive and forget the poor writing often shown in emails. "The more we use email and its tasteless writing, the more it becomes the normal way of writing," the professor says.

    Others say that despite its poor prose(文字), email has finished what several generations of English teachers couldn't: it has made writing fashionable again.

    "Email is a critical new communication technology," says Ian Lancashire, a University of Toronto professor of English." It fills the gap between spoken language and the formal methods of writing that existed before email. It is the purest form of written speech."

    Lancashire says email has the mysterious ability to get people who are scared by writing to get their thoughts flowing easily onto a blank screen. He says this is because of email's close similarity to speech." It's like a circle of four or five people around a campfire," he says.

    Still, he accepts that this new found freedom to express themselves often gets people into trouble. "Almost everyday I get emails that apologies of previous emails," he reports.

    In the US, the number of emails sent in a day exceeds(超过) the number of letters mailed in a year. But more people are recognizing the content of a typical email message is not often exact.

If you take a minute to think about the things that catch your attention, they're usually outsized (the Pyramids of Giza), extraordinarily delicate (a well-composed song), boldly colored (peacock feathers), or shocking (a bolt of lightning or a twist ending). These attention-grabbing things make us curious: Why is it like this? Where did the idea come from, or what made this happen?

From these questions come boundless story possibilities. From those ideas, though, we have to eventually cut them down to the ones worth telling, the ones that will grab and keep our readers' attention. This issue looks at that challenge from a variety of angles. Jane K. Cleland tackles the idea of thematic writing — writing that encourages readers to think about big issues that may or may not affect their lives, but at the very least will make them think What if… Then Jessica Strawser shares nine ways to write more authentic (真实的) child characters in adult fiction to bring a fresh perspective and engage readers. Tiffany Yates Martin takes on the debate of the controversial prologue (序言) — should you or shouldn't you use one? You'll have to read on to find out. When it comes to short fiction, Ran Walker offers tips for making the most of titles and first lines when every word counts. Finally, Amy Cook looks at the topic from a different angle — when your published book has stopped selling but you know it has more life in it, how can you use rights reversion to help it reach a new audience?

Our WD Interview for this issue features one author, Michael Cunningham. I was lucky enough to talk with him about his newest novel, Day, which features everything I love about a Cunningham novel: family drama, global issues made local, and impossibly affecting, heartbreaking prose. His writing advice was some of the most unexpected I've heard.

Maybe you're thinking about what you want to focus your attention on this year. Whatever your goal may be, we are glad to be with you along the way.